Beautifully crafted & user focused web design by lee munroe

This is something I’m curious about and something I’d like to get your feedback on. Do you need to confirm passwords on sign up?

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Thanks to Carsonified I’m speaking at the Future of Web Design Tour in Belfast on Wednesday 2nd September 2009.

I’ll be joining the lineup of Andy Clarke, Drew McLellan, Web Standardistas and others.

The Belfast event is being held in W5 at The Odyssey starting at 8.45am.

Tickets are still available at £59 (bargain for a FOWD event).

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I’ve always found it interesting reading the design process of others (David Airey, Contrast, Brian Hoff). It’s good to have an insight into others work, to see if I can learn anything from their process but also for curiosity. So I’ve put together a break down of my design process, using a recent project as a real life example, Newsgroup Direct.

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There are a lot of daily tasks a freelance web designer will go through:

• Going through emails
• Sending website planners to potential clients
• Reading and replying to returned website planners
• Quoting people for services
• Sending proposals
• Replying to current clients about different enquiries
• Going through new Twitter followers
• Tweeting
• Approving blog comments
• Replying to friends
• Writing blog posts
• etc.

After going through all these daily tasks, it can be very easy to see your day come and go without getting any ‘real’ work done.

When I finished University and started freelancing full time I found myself getting caught up with these daily tasks so I went about making some changes and trying to find a more effective way of dealing with them. Here are several techniques I use for getting more done.

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I often browse a handful of CSS galleries for continuous inspiration but it’s good to draw inspiration from a host of other sources, one of those being packaging.

Creative packaging shows a good reflection on the brand it represents. My first real appreciation of packaging was opening my first Apple product, which was an iPod Touch. The perfectly crafted box and minimalism is reflected throughout the Apple brand, including their website. Some even go as far as to film themselves unboxing Apple products as it is such an enjoyable experience.
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Guest post written by Mary Ward

Keeping an eye out for your career’s future is important for everyone.
However, for web designers, looking forward may be even more important than for many other professions. Many web designers are freelancers, or work for more than one company at a given time. Jobs can be short or long term contracts, so looking for the next job is often not too far out into your future.

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Us designers love a good rant about IE6. And why not? Everything looks perfect in Firefox, Safari, even IE7 and 8. Then you open up IE6 and everything is a mess. In an ideal world no one would use IE6 anymore (and all browsers would render websites the same way).

But at the same time I do get sick of IE6 rants and campaigns. This isn’t a rant, it’s more of a ‘be aware that it still exists and some reasons why it still exists‘ post. A recent blog post of mine researching popular design blog analytics showed that there are still 3% of users using IE6. And that’s in the field of design. There is more than likely a lot more than that in terms of the World Wide Web.

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These days the words renewable, fresh, organic, green etc. are used quite a bit and more and more brands and businesses are jumping on the ‘green’ band wagon (which is a good thing of course).

These are all words that I would also associate with the following websites. With the right colour scheme, using elements of nature e.g. grass and trees, adding some subtle paper backgrounds and using hand drawn graphics/text you can design a fresh ‘green’ website too.

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A few weeks ago I posted a blog post analysing my stats. It got a pretty good response as we don’t often see a lot of websites’ stats these days.

To follow this up I asked a few design blogs that I regularly visit to share their stats. No specific numbers, just percentages and interesting tidbits.
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Last week I went to Refresh Belfast and listened to the guys from Front, one of Ireland’s leading web development teams, talk about user experience and visual design among other things.

Here’s a brief roundup.

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